Monday, November 26, 2012

What Obama Thinks of Liberty

Obama’s re-election has huge symbolic value, since he epitomizes
changing attitudes towards liberty in America. He represents a growing
constituency which believes that maximization of liberty means removing
all barriers to sexual license.

It is common knowledge that no
president has been as virulently pro-abortion and pro-homosexual as
Obama. But the real significance of this is that as Obama attempts to
overturn centuries of Christian morality, he does so in the name of
liberty.

In the case of Obama’s support of abortion,
the policies he embraces actually remove liberty from the weakest and
most vulnerable members of society. Similarly, his recent support of
same-sex ‘marriage’ could see unprecedented restrictions on freedom of speech and even thought. However, Obama pursues these policies in the
name of greater freedom for the American people. This is significant
since it shows that America is involved in a sea-change shift of what
liberty actually means.

In the older tradition, the government’s
role in preserving liberty was primarily negative, with the state acting
as a hedge against outside threats to life, property and the pursuit of
happiness. In this framework, liberty was as much a restriction of the
state as it was anything else. Put another way, liberty was essentially
negative.

Since roughly the time of Franklin Roosevelt,
however, rights and liberties have increasingly come to be seen as
something the state has a responsibility to proactively create. In his
1944 State of the Union Address, Franklin Roosevelt created the template
for a new way of thinking about liberty when he called a “second Bill
of Rights” on the grounds that “Necessitous men are not free men”. If a
man is necessitous—that is, if there are things he needs but doesn’t
have—then he is lacking true liberty. Of course, if this be granted,
then the only way for the state to preserve liberty is to satisfy
people’s needs. Roosevelt thus went on to suggest that the state should
provide a “new basis of security and prosperity” which included “The
right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy
good health.”

Now there is nothing wrong in principle with the
state providing medical care to its citizens, provided it can afford to
do so. The problem is when we assert that anything less represents a
deficit of liberty, and that I can only be truly free in a society where
government meets my needs. To confuse freedom with provision in this
way is to imply that for most of the United States’ history the citizens
have never been truly free and that the ideals of liberty can only be
realized under modern activist government.

This new concept of
liberty is analogous to evolving notions of human rights. No longer are
rights God-given conditions that the state simply protects; rather,
rights become benefits that government is responsible to actually
create.

It's interesting to see how this played out in two of the
most contentious issues during the election: contraception and
Obamacare. Significantly, Obama has not simply argued that the state
should provide free contraception and healthcare to all its citizens. On
the contrary, again and again he has suggested that government must do
this because Americans have a right to it. By converting a
growing amount of needs and desires into inalienable rights, Obama has
given the American government a burden it cannot afford (literally) to
bare.

The shift in the concept of liberty and rights arises from
confusion over where our rights actually originate. Do our most basic
inalienable rights and liberties come from God, who then ordains the
state to protect those rights and liberties? Or are our most basic
inalienable rights the creation of the State?

According to America’s Declaration of Independence,
our inalienable rights come from God. It reads, “We hold these truths
to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness.” Because our most basic rights come from God, the role of the
state in preserving liberty is primarily negative, acting as a hedge against people and forces who would take away those rights.

Obama has made it clear that he disputes the notion of negative liberties. In a 2001 interview on Chicago’s public radio station WBEZ FM,
he referred to needing to "break free from the essential constraints
that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution" and he
criticized those who believed " the Constitution is a charter of
negative liberties." Bruce Walker had this to say about the utter absurdity of these new "positive liberties" that Obama hoped to introduce:

The
2001 audio tape of Barack Obama describing the Constitution as a
document of "negative liberties" reveals an utterly Orwellian Obama.
How can liberty be anything other than negative? Liberty is the absence
of external control. Only in our age of collective thinking and untidy
language could such a thing as "positive liberty" be conceived. The
state power to coerce is not liberty.

Notions like "positive
liberty" are part of the web of thought control by language manipulation
which Orwell described in 1984. If Obama cannot think of "positive
liberty" as a contradiction in terms, then he simply cannot think. The
conscious surrender of language to the needs of the party creates a
self-made prison from which escape is, quite literally, inconceivable.
These unguarded remarks by Obama display a mind trapped in a reality in
which words are phantoms.

Obama could have spoken about the
limited value of liberty. Government does some things which reduce our
private rights and yet which increase the common good. Politics is all
about where the boundary between broad notions of promoting the general
welfare by state coercion and preserving liberty should be. Politicians
on the Left have often argued that liberty should be reined in more
tightly so that "the people" can live better. But implying that more
state power somehow increases liberty is beyond mere Leftism. It is
entry into that dead realm of Newspeak in which language is pureed into
nonsense, and then nonsense is presented as argument.

Behind
Obama's Newspeak is a certain worldview that we must be attentive to.
In Obama's world, because liberties and rights do not have any objective
a priori grounding, it is totally consistent to turn them into
the plaything of an all-powerful state. Since rights and liberties do
not come from God but from the state, government has the responsibility
to invent and then dispense these positive liberties to the populace
(and indeed, to the world).

But how do we know that Obama does not
believe that rights and liberties originate with God? Listen to Obama
when he tries to quote this passage (taken from a speech made at a fundraiser for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in Rockville, Md:

As
wonderful as the land is here in the United States, as much as we have
been blessed by the bounty of this magnificent continent that stretches
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, what makes this place special is not
something physical. It has to do with this idea that was started by 13
colonies that decided to throw off the yoke of an empire, and said, “We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that each of us are endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among
these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Do
you notice something missing when Obama quotes the Declaration? He
leaves out part which says that our certain inalienable rights are
endowed to mankind “by their Creator.” Could this be a simple oversight
on Obama’s part? Perhaps, if it was only this one speech. But in fact,
Obama has misquoted the Declaration on at least two different occasions,
making it difficult to dismiss as a simple mistake. This apparently
deliberate omission is a powerful statement about Obama's worldview, in
which it is not God who gives us our most basic rights and liberties,
but the State.

Ken Myers put his finger on the pulse of this attitude in his Mars Hill Audio Journal,
when he commented that “Modern liberal societies are structured around
the assumption that since there is no one definition of happiness that
everyone can agree on, the state and state-approved social institutions
will promote freedom and equality so that everyone will be able to
pursue happiness on their own terms. However, in the absence of any
substantive understanding of happiness—of the ends of human life—freedom
and equality become variable, plastic, elusive terms, defined relative
to the cultural status quo and not objectively.”